‘No can do!’ said the driver, a squat and impeccably mannered black man who hailed, so it turned out, from the town of Ogbomosho in Nigeria, and who, from his tone of voice, was evidently caught between sympathy for Larry’s need and pride in the extravagant prohibitions of his adopted country. Larry nodded and tried to settle back on the puffed and shiny seat, gazing out at a wasteland of motels, billboards, minimalls and ‘nude’ diners. He had been to the city many times. Most of Sun Valley General had been shot at the studios on North Las Palmas, and when Doctor B figured large in the storyline Larry had been delivered to the studio in a white stretch limousine. But the place he now entered as they turned off the freeway on to Santa Monica, this megalopolis purpling under its canopy of smog, remained essentially undisclosed to him. Too bright, too big, too dirty, too foreign, Los Angeles had perhaps always been the end of his American odyssey, a last America he could never quite enter.

For ten years, ever since doing his first ads in New York when the tennis career began to fold and he had slipped into three figures on the world ratings, he had carried on his love affair with this country. His first view of New York, of Manhattan, had been through the windows of Nathan Slater’s Lincoln Town Car as they drove, one October dusk, to Slater’s seventeenth-floor offices overlooking Madison Square. Later that evening, with two or three other Slater ‘discoveries’, they had gone to the Palm on the East Side to eat lobsters. Larry was twenty-six, seduced by Slater’s attentiveness, by the baseball summary on the radio (it was World Series time), by the wraiths of steam that rose from the cracks and gratings in the road, and most of all, most breathlessly, by the filigreed beauty of the towers, whose beaconed crowns he bent his neck to get a glimpse of as they passed.