Coming over the Hollywood Hills at this time of year, you drive on roads edged with blue flowers.

The Jacaranda is dropping like crazy, and around every bend they make mansions seem to cry out their phony perfection.

You pass a mini-Tuscany and meet a little England on your way to Ventura Freeway, the 101,

that leads to a valley of shopping miles and awesome haze.

It's out here that you find Calabasas, Agura Hills and Thousand Oaks.

And this is where the world's most spoiled people come to breed and crave in an atmosphere of dieting and reality TV.

Alexis Nyers was 17 in 2008.

Her mother, Andrea, was a former playboy model and her father, a director of photography on Friends.

Thousand Oaks isn't super rich, but it's the sort of place where people care a lot about money.

Alexis and her friend Tess, who lived with her, behaved as if shopping and having things was the

only way not to be a nobody. Alexis never forgot there was gold in them there hills,

and she spent her late teens trying to establish contacts

that would lift her into the Hollywood scene.

The family did pole dancing in the living room,

and Dandria gave the girls, including Alexis's younger sister Gabby,

the amphetamine Adderall, every morning.

She said they had ADHD.

The girls knew about first class, they knew about VIP areas and fast cars, but they'd never seen a dictionary.

Many of the kids in the Southern Valley think you're odd if you don't have a card

for medical marijuana. In the autumn of 2008 and for a full year after that, Alexis began

travelling up the freeway at night in the company of some of the kids she knew from Calabasas.

Like her, they wanted to be famous, but not in the old style. The stars they liked best

...