I took off my hat and carried my gloves and walked among the drooping floral funereal tributes that had been moved from the cemetery to the Summit Drive foyer, a room with thirty-foot-high ceilings and marble floors, grand as any hotel foyer. Despite the vastness, there were so many flowers that the odor of their decay floated like miasma. The most gaudy of the displays had a card that said, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and wife. The rose-studded wreath was from my father, Sir Rowland Granville, London. After he left California, Rowland never forgot my birthday, and always sent me some extravagant gift at Christmas, but I didn’t actually see him again till Julia and I stopped in London on our way to Paris. He was playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night, an absolutely astonishing actor, and a very charming man, kind, attentive, even courtly to both of us. I liked him, but I couldn’t really bring myself to call him Daddy, and I couldn’t abide his snotty third wife. Her name is on the card too. Lady La-Di-Dah Granville.

I started up the grand staircase lined with dark, ornately framed seventeenth-century paintings. All thirty-five rooms of Summit Drive are furnished with the detritus of ruined aristocrats, art and furniture that had been collected and shipped by Leon’s agents in Europe before the War. As a child I thought nothing of this regal magnificence. Now, I find it stifling, as if the large, hoary hand of the skeletal past wants to throttle me. In Paris, the past and present are all mixed up, and I could live there happily in both. But Summit Drive is like a museum, like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, though not quite that garish.

The library was my favorite room among all the thirty-five, filled with my most cherished childhood memories. Aside from the dark, heavy Flemish tapestries across one wall it was actually airy, comfortable, with roomy wing chairs, and bookshelves full of first editions. This is the room where my grandparents sat through many dolls’ tea parties and never so much as blinked with restlessness. In this room Leon sat me on his lap and read to me: Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and Alice in Wonderland. He had such a rich, wonderful, rolling voice. This is the room where as a child I sat in on long story conferences with Leon, with Max Leslie, Simon Strassman, Nelson Hilyard, and Jerrold Davies. Half a dozen other writers came and went, but these were the core Empire writers, men who had brought the studio to its great heyday in the thirties and forties, who made millions laugh and cry with their words,