Imagine, for a fantastic moment, that you are a Hollywood star, looking around your $10m home in the hills above Los Angeles. You love the cinema next to the ballroom next to the sauna next to the indoor shark tank. But now you have everything, what you really want is Garbo-style privacy. Fan-proof and paparazzi-proof invisibility — that is the indicator of true power in Hollywood.

After all, you never see snaps of Steven Spielberg stepping out of his front door in his pyjamas, only the weak and baffled Britney Spears.

Once upon a time, stars lived easily under the public gaze in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, their homes marked on Maps of the Stars, sold on every street corner and reliable because they were drawn from purchase records filed in City Hall.

These days, celebrities prefer discretion to the pride of being, literally, on the map. Not only have A-listers scattered across the sprawling Los Angeles basin, living in clifftop caravans (Sean Penn in Malibu) or edgy ex-ghettoes (Julia Roberts in Venice Beach), they disguise their property purchases under an array of whimsically named trusts.

High-water mark

Caribbean hideaways are selling fast, but is the island of Ronde really worth $100m?

Background

• The A-Z of A-Z list celebrity islands

• Fancy living in a super-villa?

• St Lucia builds on World Cup fever

• An island idyll of your own

• Secrets of the stars

The ploy dates to the 1980s, when Bob Dylan went on a buying spree of gyms, synagogues and office blocks. He was the first to employ a manager whose name would appear as “benefactor” on public documents and trusts. Today, the singer’s property empire is glimpsed only through tax returns, but, at the 18th Street Gym in Santa Monica, ask where they got all the Dylan paintings.

Some pseudonyms are easy to rumble. Johnny Depp recently bought a $2.1m (£1.04m) penthouse in downtown LA through his Sweetzer Trust. Why Sweetzer? Because the Pirate of the Caribbean previously purchased another Hollywood home on North Sweetzer Avenue, a discreet cul-de-sac overlooking the star-haunted Chateau Marmont hotel.

In local myth — though not in fact — the property, a gated castle, was once owned by Bela Lugosi, the original Dracula.

Others are in-jokes: last summer, when Ozzy Osbourne sold the West Hollywood home featured in his MTV series to the singer Christina Aguilera for $11.5m, the deal was not, apparently, between people, but between two entities: Minnie (named after an Osbourne Pomeranian dog) and Aguilera’s Brat Pack Family Trust — a reference, perhaps, to the friends who advised her to buy the place. The deal done, Minnie then pawed over $12m for a six-bedroom, 10-bathroom mansion in Hidden Hills, west of Los Angeles, aided by an $8m mortgage. Bond girl Denise Richards owns a house a few blocks away, as does the former Friends star Matt LeBlanc.

And who is hiding behind the trust named Casa Revocable? It’s Matthew McConaughey, who, apparently under pressure from various girlfriends, is finally swapping his beachside trailer for a $10m Malibu mansion. Records show he obtained a $4m loan at 6.37%, which suggests that, despite cinematic duds like Sahara, at least bankers think the 38-year-old actor has a future in the movie business.

The deals grow more tangled as privacy becomes even more important than the tax advantages traditionally offered by a trust. But for every action, there is a reaction.

In this case, the new secrecy has attracted two bloggers obsessively dedicated to fencing with the stars and their lawyers.

They are the Chicago-based journalist Bob Goldsborough, of Big Time Listings (www.bergproperties.com/blog), and “Your Mama”, the anonymous and campy monarch of Real Estalker (realestalker.blogspot.com). She is hilarious and fast with the news, but Bob is more ruthless about publishing every detail of the celebrity transaction online — including the full address.

Times recommends

• Fall in house sales hits builders, estate agents and mortgage brokers
• Why the property credit crunch favours cash buyers
• The blood-curdling history of Quarrelwood House