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Your hair should be coiffed in an approved style (not too “done”) by an approved maestro. Your colour should be tended to by someone of the calibre of Johnathan Gale (who does everybody) in an approved salon (the one on Melrose Place that has a swimming pool in the centre — strewn with floating flowers — and is always packed with wives who manage to look beautiful with their heads covered in tin foil).

You need to have the right attorney, the right accountant, the right party planner, the right dentist, the right shrink. You must collect the right art and hire the right architect and interior designer. You must be extremely tactful and politically aware when it comes to choosing friends.

I tell you — just being introduced to this stuff when I first arrived amounted to a lot of pressure. For a start I couldn’t have cared less. Yes, I was married to a famous performer, but I’d made my own way in life. I’d had my own comedy career and had starred on American television for a season in the hit television show Saturday Night Live.

At that time, however, I was sick of my comedy career and was in California purely because I was the wife of a new Warner Brothers television star on a four-year contract. I had three young children and had to set up our lives from scratch in an industry town that I had yet to understand.

Most British people think of Los Angeles as an “anything goes” type of city, but what they don’t realise is that the powerful, successful people who inhabit a small triangle edged by Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades and Malibu have a unique code of behaviour, dress and ethics that is just as difficult to fathom as that of the British elite.

Naturally I made many gaffes — just as I had done as an Australian newcomer to Britain. One of my worst crimes was being truthful about my age. A furious Hollywood diva took me aside and explained that if I said I was 40, it made everyone else look as though they were lying — which of course they were.

I began to feel there was an inordinate amount of pressure to look good at all times (impossible for me), to accept invitations to lunch (I rarely had time) and to undergo “youthening procedures” (though I did find a few Botox shots helped me not to frown when people pissed me off). The Wall Street Journal recently suggested that it’s an advantage for a high-profile spouse to look slightly drugged-out at all times (ie, Denis Thatcher, Nancy Reagan) — and I completely agree.

I was grateful, though, that Billy never expected me to play the “power game” — in fact the idea horrified him.

For the dedicated Hollywood spouse, however, expectations are high. Through their social expertise, women are expected to provide networking opportunities that their husbands would not otherwise have. For example, befriending the wife of a studio head would be an undoubted coup; and this can often be achieved (probably more by design and research than serendipity) by attending the right yoga or Pilates class, sharing the same personal trainer, supporting the same charity or attending the same AA meeting.

Children are not exempt: they should attend pre-schools, schools and colleges that allow for the best shot at career networking. Once, the wife of an up-and-coming actor complained to me that her child’s pre-school was “the size of a postage stamp, but a great place to network during dropoff”.

A Hollywood wife with older children advised me: “You gotta get on the school board because then you have control over admissions, so people have to come to you begging. A big cash donation will do it.” And a British director who was feeling like a “disadvantaged outsider” after moving to Hollywood told me that he had laid out $30,000 in bribes to get his son into a prime “networking” school.

Even tragedy can be used to social advantage. One husband managed to bond with a top director by calling him for advice about something they had in common — his wife’s newly diagnosed cancer.

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