She has a packed schedule. And she has just received news that her former boyfriend, the gangster John Macris, has been assassinated in Greece, shot four times.

When I tell her I’ll tread carefully — given that she must be in shock — she chastises me: “I’m used to hard topics, please! That’s my middle name: challenge.”

I am under orders to set up breakfast with Jacenko, whom my editor had met a few weeks earlier for an early morning bite at Bills in Bondi.

The PR supremo, social media influencer and eastern suburbs society girl had rocked up to the popular Hall St cafe wearing flats, minimal makeup and her hair cropped short, and had wolfed down gravlax, toast and coffee.

It seemed a simple enough assignment — lots of interviews are conducted over a meal — but when it came to lining up our meeting, food was off the table.

Instead, Jacenko suggests an early morning meeting at work. Was there any chance of breakfast? Apparently, no.

“Let me tell you I need to minimise my eating,” she says.

“It’s nice to be able to put my jeans on and not be have to undo them when you sit in your car.”

Today, Jacenko, 38, is all white: white top, white shorts, white sneakers, and white socks that set off her tan and luminescent white teeth.

“Well, I’ve got fake everything,” she says unapologetically.

And then, more by way of biography than justification; “I had a big nose, I fixed it. I had no tits, I fixed them.”

“The nose was painful,” she adds with a good-natured laugh. “But trust me, my nose would enter the room before me.”

And yet, paradoxically, Jacenko is known for her authenticity.

As you’d expect from the author of Roxy’s Little Black Book of Tips and Tricks — subtitled, The No-Bullsh*t Guide to All Things PR, Social Media, Business and Building Your Brand — which hit the shelves last month, she says: “If it is good I will applaud you. If it is shit I will tell you.

“I am not in business to make friends … You don’t employ me to say yes, yes, yes.”

Although endlessly uploading a barrage of doe-eyed and whippet-thin selfies on her Instagram, woe betide anyone who dismisses her as another vapid influencer.

Efficient and whip-smart, pragmatic and savagely witty, Jacenko runs four businesses: Ministry of Talent, Sweaty Betty PR, Social Union, and Pixies Bows.

Clients such as the Park Hyatt Sydney, Mirvac Retail, Lorna Jane Active and L’Occitane en Provence, and Stan, for whom she is ambassador, are testament to her status in the majors, although she is as loyal to smaller brand clients.

Contradictions abound. Her parents had money — father Nick and mother Doreen built a successful wholesale clothing empire — leading to an upbringing in prestige suburbs and an education at elite private girls school, Kambala.

But she has the drive more often seen in first-generation Jewish immigrants and an obsession with luxury that usually befits people who never encountered any.

The fancy bottled water served in her office is apparently also a favourite of Justin Bieber.

The dressing room upstairs in her office has a hair basin (for her personal stylist) and an ultrasonic jewellery cleaner (“that’s why I’m so sparkly”). Even the texture of the toilet paper is extra thick. And it’s black. When I point this out, she wags her finger: “Don’t use too much — it’s expensive.”

In late Spring, at the Wentworth Courier cover shoot in Martin Place, she is toying with a Cartier-themed shopping spree but reins herself in. “I’ve had an expensive week”, she says, referring to her purchase of a $6.5 million Vaucluse mansion and payment for a brand new Aston Martin.

Later, she will tell me bluntly, “I’m expensive to keep”. She is also phenomenally hard working — she’ll add to that description “detail-orientated” and a “control freak”. She packs and sends each order of Pixies Bows — the hair accessories she designed and fronted by her seven-year-old, Pixie — to keep them puffy and fresh.

“I have (success) … because I have worked for it. I have literally sold my soul every day to get … to where I am,” she says.

Francesca Packer Barham, the 23-year-old granddaughter of the late Kerry and daughter of the formidable Gretel, is a close friend.

Intelligent and thoughtful, Barham is studying psychology in London. She recently holidayed in Mexico with Jacenko on Arctic P, her uncle James’s yacht.

Barham tells the Wentworth Courier she values Jacenko’s honesty most. “She’s the friend that will tell you if you look fat in the jeans but she’s also one of the funniest, most driven, caring and compassionate women I know.

“You just have to take the time to get to know her and if you do, she doesn’t disappoint.”

She adds “I’ve seen her grow from strength to strength to accomplish things that I would say she even surprised herself with”.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’d know most of the plot lines in the Jacenko soap opera. Her husband, Oliver Curtis, (once engaged to another Sydney socialite he left for Jacenko), was sent to jail in 2016 for insider trading.

Three weeks later she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery. During Curtis’ incarcerations she was photographed kissing another ex, Sydney society scion Nabil Gazal.

She no longer speaks to her father, who is in a relationship with fashion designer Lisa Ho, after a very public bust-up amid her parents’ acrimonious divorce.

A magnet for drama, compounded by her “take me as I am” attitude, Jacenko is oft-described as “polarising”. The business world treats her with cautious respect and awe. Rivals describe her as endlessly “attention seeking”.

There is criticism of her children fronting marketing campaigns for products (Pixie and Hunter have more than 124,000 Instagram followers combined) — to which she has previously responded: “I think the reality is everyone is going to have an opinion on how you parent, what you do, what you don’t do.” Eastern suburbs figures of her parents generation are most critical (privately of course) of the conduct during her husband’s trial, when Jacenko, adopting an Andy Warhol attitude to publicity, turned up every day in a different designer outfit and posted selfies on the way to the courthouse.

Curtis’s conviction appeared to come as a shock. But, says Sydney socialite Barbara Coombes, Jacenko’s close friend, it was also a turning point.

“There was a moment there where it almost all came crumbling down. She was in a downward spiral. I’d never seen this side of her,” she says. “Many kicked her when she was down”.

But, adds Coombes, “instead of being the victim” there was “the biggest change in her both personally and professionally. She admits her failings, she’s taken responsibility for them, she no longer surrounds herself with ‘yes people’.

“She’ll cop it on the chin, the good with the bad.”

At the launch of her book, a colourful lunch held at Bistro Moncur in Woollahra, pink cocktails match the hot pink cover. Dressed in neon orange, dripping in loaned diamonds ($1.1 million’s worth), Jacenko’s every move is being filmed for Channel 7.

Getting up to give a speech, she gasps: “Can someone pass me a Valium?” The Valium is a joke.

But Jacenko insists to me later “I don’t want that amount of attention on me. It’s almost like an act for me now — that’s what it’s become. I am shy. I’m the most unsocial person you’ll ever meet.”

Still, soirees like this — for which Jacenko spent a small “fortune” — are critical. It’s a showcase: she asserts she would never merely offer “guests one glass of champagne and a cucumber sandwich.” All such parties and launches are lavish; shock and awe via food, flowers and gifts.

Creamy invitations from her agency Sweaty Betty (she swiped the name from a storefront she saw in Paris) come on heavy card stock.

Parcels sent by VIP courier are wrapped in the agency’s trademark fancy black and white cotton ribbon, It’s all planned, she explains in her book — to do with adhering to “systems”, processes” and “consistency”, which she learned, of all places, during her high school job at McDonalds.

If traditionally PRs were seen and not heard, invisible figures working behind the scenes, Jacenko takes a different approach. “You need to be that person who is in their face, you need to be the person who is memorable,” she says.

The flashiness, the endless self-promotion is, ultimately, a business strategy. And clients want to know: if they sign up with Sweaty Betty PR will they appear on Jacenko’s social media? Her answer: “Absof***inglutely.”

Jacenko — a self-diagnosed workaholic — emits a skittish energy, delivering one-liners like a boxer’s punches. She often wakes up at 1am — “which is lucky because then I can answer emails”.

This, she explains, is “how you go from being a receptionist at a jeans company to building four businesses”, a nod to her rise through the ranks of the PR world which came via stints with Theo Onisforou and Diesel, before opening her own outfit with her parents’ backing.

Of late, Curtis, 33, has joined the suite of Jacenko’s companies as COO. After prison “he struggled,” she says.

“I said it the day he came out of jail … whether we are together or not together, I will support you.” At the moment, they seem happy.

“He doesn’t try and control me, he backs me,” she says. “I have not had that before.”

There is a cost to building an empire and reigning supreme on Sydney’s social scene that can’t be met with cash.

The day of our interview, Hunter had burst into tears and begged Jacenko: “Don’t go to work”.

And despite the running commentary on how much everything costs and the cars, the handbags, the ebony-coloured toilet paper — I venture that perhaps, deep down, this is not about the money.

“It’s just success,” she agrees.

“It’s purely down to success. I’m not going to lie, everyone likes money. Money means we have opportunities to see things and experience things. But it’s an obsession about success … I see it as a race and I want to win it.

“There are so many opportunities but if I feel like if I’m walking, not running those opportunities will go to someone else. I don’t want to be beaten. I don’t.”