excitement as Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

He is the son of one of the greatest Hollywood legends and the star of 80 films. He became a secret US envoy and diplomat as the world went to war.

During it, he became a decorated Navy hero.

Across the decades, he has been a pillar of the Anglo-American community with social ties stretching from the White House to Buckingham Palace. And now, at 84, he is a best-selling author.

With his wife Vera, Mr. Fairbanks flew to Bermuda for a weekend break at the Pink Beach Club. He is in the midst of promoting A Helluva War, the second volume of his planned three-part autobiography.

He visited Bermuda many years ago aboard Queen Elizabeth 2 and remembered it as "beautiful and pleasant''.

"I always wanted to come back,'' he told The Royal Gazette with his eyes fixed on the "marvellous blues'' of the ocean just beyond his hotel room.

"We just want to relax and get out of New York. I'm going to have a hard time leaving. Maybe I'll break a leg and stay for a while.'' Mr. Fairbanks' leg has been on his mind more than he cares for these days. A tear in the cartilage of the right knee sometimes swells making it difficult to walk.

Perhaps he should see a doctor, he thinks.

"When did you tear it,'' the reporter asks, thinking it a recent injury.

"Making Gunga Din,'' Mr. Fairbanks said.

That was in 1939, with Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen, when Mr. Fairbanks was at his most bankable as a Hollywood star.

"I tore this cartilage doing stunts,'' he said. "I was six years in the war, five years in combat and never got a scratch. But I broke my ribs and all my fingers in both hands at various times and tore a muscle in my thigh -- all in the movies. Ridiculous.'' There is little that can be asked of Mr. Fairbanks that doesn't bring to mind all sorts of gilded images.

He grew up in the shadow of his father, whose swashbuckling films made him Hollywood's first adventure hero. There were other legends too. Charlie Chaplin was his friend and mentor. John Barrymore inspired him to become an actor.

Pickfair, the home Mr. Fairbanks' father shared with Mary Pickford, his second wife, was Hollywood's mecca in the early days.

The Duke of York, who was to become King George VI, honeymooned there. Mr.

Fairbanks Jr. played tennis with him and became friends. In 1949, the King knighted him.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another family friend, would come to use Mr.

Fairbanks' considerable contacts in England during the 1930s. At a dinner one night at the Savoy, Mr. Fairbanks passed a secret message from the president to Winston Churchill, who was then still in the wilderness, warning the world of the Nazi threat.

During the war, Mr. Fairbanks joined the staff of Admiral of the Fleet Louis Mountbatten -- another long-time family friend who also honeymooned at Pickfair.

The association led him to become the only American to work with a special team of British commandos known as the Beach Jumpers. His assignment -- which took him on cross-Channel missions into Nazi-held Europe -- was to learn British commando procedures for adoption by the US Navy.

They were exciting times and Mr. Fairbanks is pleased with his latest book about it all. But it leaves him with what seems a daunting challenge: The third and final volume.

"My publishers are now asking for another book, but I don't think it will be exciting enough,'' he says.

Mr. Fairbanks' links with the elite, both in cinema and politics, obviously owe a great deal to his father and stepmother. But as his wife Vera indicates, his own personal charm, friendliness, intellectual curiosity and gift of the gab took him most of the way.

"He tends to love people,'' she said. "It's quite easy for him to fit into any situation.'' Mr. Leslie Halliwell, the famous film historian and critic, also touched on that gift in his summary of Mr. Fairbanks' life: "...of more conventional and debonair mould than his father, he spent as much time in drawing rooms as on castle battlements, but was at home in any surroundings.'' "I've never been bored in my life,'' Mr. Fairbanks said. "My curiosity about things and people has always been strong. I've had a lifetime of being mixed up in every situation.'' It is clear from his first book, The Salad Days, that Mr. Fairbanks had a difficult relationship with his distant father.

"I was closer to Chaplin than my father,'' he said. "When I was young, nobody would play with me but Chaplin. He'd get on my roller coaster and ride it with me.'' He recalls Chaplin counselling him on his career as an actor after opening a play in Los Angeles in 1927. They sat on the curb outside the theatre after everyone else had left, including his father.

"He was the only one to wait behind after everyone else had gone,'' he said.

"Charlie was my only serious supporter that night. We were there for a couple of hours.'' What did Mr. Fairbanks think of the film Chaplin, in which Robert Downey Jr.

played Chaplin.

"He was good but he didn't look like Chaplin,'' Mr. Fairbanks said. What about Kevin Kline, who played his father? "Kevin Kline was tall and thin. My father was five foot nine, small and stocky.'' Few viewers of that film, which earned Mr. Downey an Oscar nomination, would have been struck in such a way.

Although Mr. Fairbanks says there was a rapprochement between father and son toward the end of his father's life, it is clear his early death at 57 left things unresolved.

When asked about people who influenced his life, he lists Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Mountbatten and Barrymore.

"What about your father?'' "My father? By inference. We were distant, mostly because we were shy.'' The list of Mr. Fairbanks' friends is as close to a pantheon of the 20th Century as any individual can attain. The names come steadily but without any trace of a need to name drop for self-glorification.

He has known most of the presidents since Roosevelt. He has a letter from Eisenhower mulling about the tug of presidential politics and his desire to remain above it all.

He had a shipboard dinner with Einstein. Mr. Fairbanks recalls seeing Einstein take the bill for the table, hold it in his left hand and then silently count who owed what with the fingertips of his right hand.

In 1963, Mr. Fairbanks was touched by worldwide scandal during the sensational divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. Mr. Fairbanks was listed by the Duke as one of four possible lovers of his wife. A photograph used in evidence showed the Duchess, wearing only a string of pearls, and a naked man whose head was not in the picture.

When the Duchess died last week on London, the English Press called on him to confess but, as he did 30 years ago, Mr. Fairbanks denied yesterday that he was the notorious "headless man''.

"I do not know who the hell it was,'' Mr. Fairbanks said. There was some rumour about a politician but I never knew and I didn't want to find out.'' But all in all, it was a wonderful life and, at 84, Mr. Fairbanks recognises the great days are past. He has seen many of his friends pass away. He mentions Olivier and Niven.

"I miss a lot of my friends,'' he said. "The only ones remaining are Jimmy Stewart and Buddy Rogers'', who married Mary Pickford.

He doesn't dwell on the past. Hollywood, particularly the glory days before the war, wasn't all it is remembered as.

"The days of Hollywood were not exciting days,'' he said. "They weren't glamorous days. They were just work days.'' Regardless of such awareness, Mr. Fairbanks does concede that "I would love to do it all again. I resent the passage of time...'' Even though he has a movie actor's privilege of celluloid immortality, he knows it doesn't hold real meaning.

"I'm realistic enough and cynical enough to know that as soon as I'm cooled and put away, no one is going to give a damn except my immediate family.'' In the meantime, Mr. Fairbanks said he just wants to "look at the sea. The colours are beautiful.'' Mr. Douglas Fairbanks Jr.