The world is getting disturbingly small. A fortnight ago, I was in Corsica. Next stop North Africa - then the call came from the charter company Gold Air International: 'We're buying a new Lear jet, and flying it from the factory to London. Would you like to come along?' I had to pinch myself: Lears are the personal transport of film stars and billionaires. I was being offered a chance to cross the Atlantic at close to the speed of sound in a privileged stratosphere, far above turbulence and tourist jumbos.

A few days later I arrived in Tucson, Arizona. While the Gold Air team stayed at the Sheraton, your correspondent found the cheaper Hotel Congress, an art nouveau pile which has sheltered the gangster John Dillinger and the cross-dressing FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.

The next morning I was whisked, bleary-eyed, to the Lear factory by its director, Leon Rossow, the public face of a company providing transportation to the world's élites. The jets' Dorchester-like interiors bring out nouveau riche tendencies in some clients. 'We have millions of trim combinations,' Rossow told me, 'but some customers do like to provide their own fittings, which have included gold taps and zebra-skin upholstery. Some Brazilian clients have gone so far as to bring their own tree, from which the veneers are made.'

I track down Will Curtis, Gold Air's managing director, and find he's having problems collecting his plane: a Lear accountant somehow omitted to cash his $10,000,000 cheque, and it is a bank holiday. Curtis is stranded in Tucson, and furious. 'I may go to LA for a few days,' I say hesitantly, 'I have a sister and brother-in-law there.' 'Fine,' says Curtis. 'We'll pop over next week and pick you up.'

By nightfall I'm sitting in an LA mansion from Hollywood's pre-war heyday, all cool courtyards and exposed Hispanic beams - very Sunset Boulevard, very LA Confidential - with my relatives, Susan and Bill, and our hosts: the Czech film director Jiri Weiss and his wife, Katerina.

Weiss, now in his eighties, is a mittel-European intellectual as incongruous in Hollywood as Aldous Huxley must have been. A twinkle-eyed ex-communist, he spent the war in London, where he knew, among others, Bernard Shaw. 'I spent some time at Dartington,' Weiss told us, 'which was terribly progressive, and encouraged young people to swim in the nude. On one occasion, I was swimming with a girl. A man reading a newspaper kept edging his seat towards us until he was in danger of tumbling into the pool. "That horrible old fat man keeps leering at us," my companion told me. It was H.G. Wells.'

The aspiring film-maker lived in north London garrets and made a living as a waiter 'at the Savoy, 'which I hated. You British could be very racist. One day a repulsive female customer described a colleague of mine as a dago. He was enraged. In the kitchen he performed into her salad an act that delicacy forbids me from describing.'

I spent four days in LA before my brother-in-law Bill drove me to Santa Monica airport, where we watched the Lear land. Will Curtis gave me a thumbs-up from the captain's seat, as the Californian sun slid over the Union flag on the tail of the miniature, eight-seater airliner. 'This, said my brother-in-law, 'is like something out of a goddam James Bond movie!'

I would soon be crossing the US at 50,000 ft and nearly 600 mph. But even Lear jets need to refuel, and there were blizzards on the East Coast...