The royal family of rock

Ann's own background is upper-middle-class Jewish intellectual. Her father, Frederick Dexter, came to Britain from Vienna before the war, following in the footsteps of his uncle Sir Oscar Deutsch (who founded the Odeon cinemas chain); she is also related to the former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and the former Home Secretary Leon Brittan. Her parents settled in Liverpool, where her father was an eye surgeon. When she was ten, she recalls being summoned to his study with her three brothers and her little sister, to be told that their lifestyle was far too bourgeois. 'He said, "It's like living behind nylon curtains, you are not really seeing what is out there," ' she recalls. 'So he spun the globe and we were going to move where his finger landed.' The fates decreed Australia. But on the boat, Ann's mother Judith became seriously ill with ulcerative colitis. 'It's a condition that's exacerbated by your emotions,' says Ann. 'She was leaving her family and friends behind and she was always more of a homebody.' On arrival in Australia, Judith was taken to hospital. 'My father decided to send us back to my mother's family in Scotland because he was staying at the hospital every night. We pretended to her that we were going to the Blue Mountains to ski. I had a horrible dread as I said goodbye to her that I wasn't going to see her again.'

Worse was to come: on the way to Singapore, three of the plane's four engines caught fire and it crashed on to a disused airstrip. 'Many people died,' she recalls, 'but the five of us survived. The headline in The Sydney Morning Herald was An Angel Brought This Plane Down – everyone should have died. So they flew us back to Australia and when we got there, we found that our mother had died. The death certificate was issued within seconds of the plane crash-landing.' Forty years on, her eyes are full of tears.

Thereafter, her father circled the globe with his children – 'looking for her' is Ann's analysis. She attended 14 schools and lived in Australia, New Zealand, London, Hampshire and Westcliffe-on-Sea; they tried to return to the family house in Liverpool but her father found it too sad. The glamorous but unsettled Ann had no desire for motherhood, having taken over mothering duties for her siblings when she was in her early teens. 'And what with losing my mother and then the plane crash, I didn't have a lot of faith in the future,' she admits.

After abandoning several fiancés, she got married in her early twenties to Laurence Ronson, the brother of property tycoon and Heron boss Gerald (who was later imprisoned in the Guinness share-trading scandal in the 1980s when he and others were accused of inflating the price of Guinness shares in order to facilitate its takeover bid of drinks company Distillers). Laurence had his own high street video distribution company and managed bands including Bucks Fizz. On their honeymoon in LA, he took Ann to meet his friend Mick Jagger, who, she says, immediately
propositioned her. But Ann is not groupie material. 'The thought of dating someone who had a million girls slipping telephone numbers into his pockets was never appealing to me.'

At first, the marriage was a happy one. The Ronsons had three children, Mark, now 34, Samantha, 32, and her twin Charlotte. Their home in St John's Wood, down the road from Paul McCartney's, became a celebrity hangout. Robin Williams once tucked Mark into bed; the children would wake up to find their dad playing chess with Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates; Keith Moon insisted that the young Mark should be given a drum kit, and so forth.

'We didn't want anything from them, and they didn't want anything from us' is Ann's analysis of why her house was bursting at the seams with A-listers. She also puts it down to her mother. 'She'd see these little old ladies waiting in line to buy salmon skins, or spot someone at a bus stop who seemed in trouble, and she'd ask them round for dinner'

When Mark was six, the marriage imploded. 'Laurence and I went through a very bad patch,' Ann says discreetly. 'We were young and immature. I still loved him but I knew it wasn't a healthy environment for the children and I didn't know how to fix it.'

It was during her divorce that she first met Mick Jones, guitarist for the Anglo-American soft-rock band Foreigner (biggest hits: 'I Want To Know What Love Is' and 'Waiting for a Girl Like You') at a dinner party. 'He proposed to me that night – he said the thunderbolt had struck him. I just thought it was a corny line. Anyway, I wouldn't have noticed if Brad Pitt had walked in. I knew I was in for a rocky divorce because the family had power and money and I wanted sole custody of the
children, so the last thing I needed was a rock'n'roll boyfriend.' Perhaps she was worrying unduly since she did get sole custody and is on excellent terms with her former in-laws.

Meanwhile, Mick Jones sent her orchids every day for six months until she changed her mind. She moved to New York to be with him two years later, and married him in 1985, when she was pregnant with Alexander. The move brought Ann and her family into a new circle; she hobnobbed with the Princess of Wales when she came to America and hung out with Yoko Ono while Mark became best friends with her son Sean Lennon, and even, rather scarily, had a sleepover with Michael Jackson. 'At the time, he was the biggest star in the world,' Mark has said. 'But because my stepfather was a musician, it didn't seem that out of the ordinary. Michael Jackson was a guy whose records I loved, but he just watched videos with us and ran around playing with a toy laser. At the time I didn't think twice about it. Now, of course, I look back on it and wonder, "Did anything odd happen?" But it didn't.'

Ann has dabbled in journalism (she's written for Tatler and The New York Times), is a Reiki master, and supports various youth
rehabilitation charities but had no time for a career. Apart from bringing up her children and organising parties in their apartment in the San Remo building (where Tiger Woods, Donna Karan and Bono have all lived), she had to accompany Foreigner on tour. 'Mick wrote 'I Want To Know What Love Is' for me, so I had to sit at the side of the stage when he sang it,' she says with a giggle. In the summer, the children would go on tour, too. 'Getting them to bed on time was very difficult,' she sighs.

It was on one of these tours that she first got the idea of creating her own identity bracelet and, on her return home, tracked down a clutch of New York-based artisans to make it for her. 'And then about 100 people asked me if I could make one for them, too.' She turned down all the requests until her 23-year marriage to Mick Jones imploded. They divorced, rather bitterly, in 2007. 'I'm not a quitter, but I couldn't change how things were,' she says obliquely. 'I don't want to go into details, but I'm just getting to know him again after not speaking to him for years.'

It was only once she was single again that Ann decided to turn a hobby into a new career. And success seems to come as naturally to her as it does to the rest of her talented clan. 'I keep having different ideas,' she says excitedly, 'but I have to stop myself because I need to
let the business grow.'

Buyers for smart boutiques, such as New York's temple to accessories Edon Manor, are now wearing a path to the door of her West Village apartment, but Ann has come up against a surprising difficulty: a reluctance to blow her own trumpet. During the course of our conversation, she has dropped names galore and discussed at length her
children's Mensa-level intellects, their talent and generosity. But when it comes to plugging her own wares, she is suddenly shy. 'I think it sounds like I'm showing off,' she says anxiously.

Ann Dexter-Jones's jewellery is available at Dover Street Market