“It’s Lindsay 🙂 Hiya! You interested in coming to the club tonight?”

It’s nearing midnight. The air outside the north London studio is still warm, and from the balcony we watch, Lindsay and I, the jagged outline of the capital twinkling in its urban peaks and troughs. Parliament cigarette in one hand, mobile phone in the other, Lindsay has decided, mid-fag break, to conduct her own mini photo shoot. ‘Look! We should just do it out here,’ she giggles, showing me her shots, while Rankin and a 20-strong team wait patiently inside.

Even in BlackBerry self-portraits, Lindsay Lohan is stunning. The camera does something to her. Those pretty, delicate features fall into enthralling perfection. That tiny body, childlike in real life were it not for the voluptuous chest, snaps into a fine example of womanhood. Skin and hair all in tones of faded copper. Cinema/camera/mobile phone – La Lohan was made for every screen.

She tells me that tomorrow she is making an appearance at a club night. ‘You should come,’ she says. She needs the company. Generally, Hollywood doesn’t travel solo. If there is not a troupe, there is at least a companion, often a friend who has been segued into payroll, or an employee who has come to mean more than that. Lindsay only has Magali, a freelance PA she picked up in Paris and has known for two days, and another hired stranger, Tom, her British bodyguard, who she first met five hours ago, as he wrestled her through the waiting paparazzi scrum at St Pancras station.

She has no friends in London, she says. She looks like she has friends: the figures scuffling behind her in the newspaper pap shots, the nightclub cohorts who chat and flatter and get close. Surrounded, but alone. It’s been the theme of many a starlet’s life. And this one lived in a hotel for two years, maybe to ensure that someone, anyone, would always be around.

Later, she will get my number and around 24 hours from now our surreal evening together will begin to unfold. But long before that, in just a moment, actually, one of the team will come out to the balcony and try to coax Lindsay back on set. Lindsay will insist on smoking one more cigarette. Despite the fact it’s midnight, nobody argues. Because merely getting her here has been an unprecedented epic of pursuit, persuasion and compromise. Now there is just unspoken relief that the shoot is happening at all.

Alarm bells start clanging when, the day before a major shoot due to start in London at 9.30am the next morning, you realise that your cover star, who was in Italy 24 hours earlier (so you discovered via a glance at Twitter), is now in Paris. With no immediate travel plans.

Naturally, you contact her publicist, to find out just what is going on. She’ll sort it out. That’s what publicists do.

Darling, she is so sorry but she is, indeed, in Paris. She has other commitments and it’s just impossible for her to make it. A day of negotiation begins. Maybe she can arrive at 12pm? Actually, more like 4pm. Twice the shoot is cancelled and then reinstated, frantic phone calls made to the dozens involved: studio, photographer, assistants, stylists, hair and make-up. After one missed train, Lindsay tweets a picture of herself on the Eurostar. This is the first time we are sure she is on her way. She arrives at 7pm, spends two hours checking into her hotel, gets to the shoot at 9.30pm – a perfect 12 hours late – and leaves at just after 2am.