Will it rain? Though clouds glower overhead, I lift the black veil on my hat and put my sunglasses on so I don’t have to meet anyone’s gaze as we listen to the droning voice extolling Julia Greene’s accomplishments as if she had just graduated rather than died. Errant, uninspired raindrops descend, enough that women pull their mink stoles closer, and many people look up, surprised. In this vast sea of celebrity—the stars who glitter in the cinematic heavens and the producers, directors, and studio heads who make their lives hell—no one believes there can be rain unless the director says, Cue the thunder. We, the family, are seated in front of the mahogany casket, which is bedecked with orchids. Beside me Leon is stoic, not an expression that reflects remorse. Does he regret breaking Julia’s heart? Does he even care that she died alone in Paris? The thought makes me want to cry all over again, but hearing her voice in my head—Never forget that you are Roxanne Granville, named for the romantic heroine of a great play—I forbid myself the luxury of tears. I remind myself that she sent me to L’Oiseau d’Or, a Parisian finishing school for the contemptibly rich, where I learned one never admits there’s anything one can’t endure except for vulgarity. Like this vulgar send-off. Look at all this gaudy array of stupendously garish floral tributes. It’s as though they were ordered by some freewheeling set designer operating without a budget. Julia, with her standards, would have laughed at every ostentatious moment, but she would have understood that it could not be otherwise. This is Hollywood, after all.

She would not have been amused to see some of these faces, since Julia didn’t share Leon’s rabid anti-Red convictions. John Wayne, Ward Bond, Gary Cooper, Hedda Hopper, Cecil B. DeMille, Ginger Rogers, and all the rest of Leon’s staunch allies from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, they’re all here, looking stylishly somber. Every one of them is well aware that we are simultaneously the audience as well as the actors in this mourning drama. Even a funeral becomes a theatrical occasion.