I turn out to be every bit as ambitious as they are."

When he moved from Toronto, where he was born simply as Frank Goldberg, to Los Angeles, he reinvented himself not just as Gehry but as the diffident Woody Allen of architecture's cut-throat world. He got noticed when he divorced, re-married, and then transformed a conventional LA bungalow into the prototypical Gehry building, with strange shapes, eccentric materials, and wonderful light.

Gehry played the bumbler but he knew just how to tiptoe around large egos. So he proved just as congenial to the Hollywood crowd as he did to the New York architects. Gehry was as bedazzled by the stars as he was by the free-form Los Angeles vernacular, and he schmoozed his way into relationships with all the skill of a Renaissance master cosying up to the Medicis.

Commissions started small. "One night we saw Jennifer Jones get out of a limo," he recalled for Isenberg, "and I thought how elegant she was; years later, when I was doing her house, I told her that story."

And then they got big. Isenberg describes a trip to Bilbao on which Gehry was recruited by Thomas Krens, the developer of his Guggenheim masterpiece, to join a celebrity motorcycle expedition with Jeremy Irons, Diane von Furstenberg and Diane's husband, Barry Diller.

They all got chatting, and Diller duly commissioned Gehry to build his IAC corporate headquarters by the Hudson River in Manhattan's Chelsea neighbourhood, another dazzler clad with translucent panels shaped like the sails of river barges.

Not long before he died suddenly of cancer, I interviewed the Hollywood producer, director and actor Sydney Pollack, who had just made a documentary film of his friend, titled Sketches of Frank Gehry. I could see that he too was a mogul taken in by the schtick. "There is something about Frank that struck me as being absolutely genuine and authentic," he told me. "He is not manipulative in terms of your opinion of him. A straight shooter."

Pollack would meet him at parties, and talk about ordinary, everyday life. It did not occur to him that Gehry was anything other than a modest