Identical signs reared over the rooftops of Los Angeles, and even over Sunset Boulevard, where another writer, Joe Gillis, had become entangled in the Hollywood dream. In our hotel I switched on the television set to find commercials for the film filling the screen with low-flying Mustangs, a real Shanghai burning again as Japanese soldiers marched down the Bund and my boyhood self was swept up in a panic of coolies and office clerks. Arm in arm, Cleo and I stared from our terrace at the billboard over Wilshire Boulevard. My past had escaped from my head and was clambering across the rooftops like some doomed creature in a forties monster movie.

Happily, the irony of all this was not lost on Cleo.

“How did Sinbad get the genie back in the bottle? Think.”

“God knows—some piece of low cunning, I suppose.”

“You’ve spent years writing about the media landscape, and now it’s escaped and stood you in the palm of its hand.”

“I’ll rent a car tomorrow. We’ll find the real Los Angeles.”

“Dear, wake up. This is the real Los Angeles.”

The next morning we set out on a circuit of this mysterious city. Entire districts sat in the musty sunlight like intact fragments of television episodes, as strangely familiar as the revisited streets of one’s childhood. Far from being the youngest, Los Angeles was the oldest city of the twentieth century, the Troy of its collective imagination. The ground courses of our deepest dreams were layered into its past among the filling stations and freeways.

*   *   *

On the day before the premiere, while Cleo was visiting English friends in Santa Barbara, the reception desk rang to say that a Mrs. Weinstock had called to see me. Assuming she was a local journalist, I asked the desk clerk to send her up to our suite. Moments later, I opened the door to find a handsome American woman in her middle sixties, strikingly dressed in a Persian-lamb coat and silk hat. Her commanding eyes rose instantly to the challenge when I failed to recognise her.

“James, you’re too busy to remember me?” She stepped forward, in a heady aura of perfume and expensive fabrics. She seized my shoulders and pressed my face to her smooth cheeks. “Olga! Olga Ulianova from Shanghai!”

“Olga…?” I was pinned against the television screen by my childhood governess, who had materialised from the Hollywood sky like the billboards and TV commercials. “Olga … I can’t believe it…”