Hollywood Letter: Seems it never rains in southern California, or so the song goes. I was never sure whether the song was about the Californian climate or the sunny attitude of Californians.
After arriving in Los Angeles, I decided to find out and did what every journalist in doubt does: I asked a taxi driver.
My first and last taxi driver in LA was an Iranian-born man named Farhad who had good, if halting English. So, does it ever rain in southern California?
"I never remember bad weather, sir," says Farhad carefully, delivering a marvellously ambiguous answer.
Not that it really matters: it's 38 degrees, we're sailing down Sunset Boulevard and the radio is playing classics from the American Songbook. We've already taken a three-minute trip on a Slow Boat to China which was just De-Lovely. Now Dinah Washington has started Destination Moon. I know how the poor woman feels: I've been in LA for a day already and I still feel like I'm in another world.
I've just left the Getty Center, an extraordinary off-white architectural folly perched high on the Santa Monica Mountains over Los Angeles. Think London's South Bank, whitewashed. The overall effect is Las Vegas meets the Aztecs, but the galleries boast an incredible collection of Munch, Monet, Degas and half a dozen Rembrandts, not to mention that old favourite, Van Gogh's Waterlilies.
From high culture to low and a trawl though Hollywood with Mike, my tour guide, who has eight fingers and, he says, no acting ambitions.
We visit the Acting Academy of Stella Adler, the doyenne of method acting whose students have ranged from Marlon Brando to Robert Davi, the face of a dozen Colombian drug barons invariably called Carlos, Sanchez or Mendoza in everything from The A-Team to A View to a Kill.
During the Prohibition era, the academy was the Embassy, Hollywood's most exclusive club. We slipped into a windowless, wood-panelled room that is one of America's few surviving speakeasies, accessed through a revolving bookcase.
Here Gable and Lombard chatted with Davis and Bogart over a glass of gin from the small distillery behind the bar. The speakeasy was never raided, no doubt because the Hollywood chief of police was a club member and liked to rub shoulders with the stars.
From bathtub gin to the sobering walk down Hollywood Boulevard. Just 100 years ago, there was nothing here but beanfields.
The first arrivals from the east set up a religious colony; the sin came later.
These days, even the sin is a distant memory and the main strip through Hollywood is a heaving tourist trap of the worst kind.
In the scorching midday sun, a sweaty Snow White ties balloon animals with uneven-sized limbs while outside Grauman's Chinese Theater, the movie palace where Art Deco meets Chippendale, dozens of tourists bake in the sun along with the famous handprints and footprints in concrete.
It's a measure of Hollywood Boulevard's seediness that I feel relieved when I take refuge in the cool, cool, cool of McDonald's. Despite everything, the Hollywood magic appears to be working on some people: I watch a man with one leg scoot along the pavement outside with a bottle in one hand, a rag in the other, polishing the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Neither of us is going to end up immortalised in marble anytime soon, I think, but his loving smile suggests he has other ideas.
Hollywood Boulevard is on its last legs, though. Disney bought and renovated El Capitan movie palace a decade ago and has just snapped up the Freemason building next door.
It's a Darwinian property deal, I think to myself: survival of the fittest among the pervasive organisations of the world that spend most of their time trying to convince people they are benign.
Perhaps some Disney magic can magic away the Scientologists down the street.
That evening I head downtown to Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, former home of the Oscars, for a wonderful production of A Little Night Music, the musical that gave the world Send in the Clowns. I was expecting LA to be more a case of Send in the Clones, but I cannot find the shiny, happy plastic people anywhere.
There's nary a Botoxed beauty to be seen in Malibu, Rodeo Drive or in my hotel, the Casa del Mar on Santa Monica beach, a favourite hideaway of the stars.
Recent guests included Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe trying, unsuccessfully, to have a discreet yet dirty weekend.
