The bad news of the Malibu place was that I had to park my sweet little British sports car behind the bungalow on Pacific Coast Highway, where the salt air would eat away at the paint and the leather seats and the polished wood dashboard. Without telling Leon or Melvin Grant, I paid an Empire carpenter to build a garage for the MG.

Wearing rubber gloves and scouring away, I finally vanquished the dirt and decay while loud music played on my hi-fi—Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como. I hung the framed movie posters. On the living room desk overlooking the Pacific, I put two framed photographs—a studio photograph of Julia from the thirties, and a snapshot of the two of us in Paris. I particularly liked this picture, because you could see the family resemblance. We both have dark hair, wide-set, dark eyes, broad foreheads, and the same smile.

Only then, when I had imparted some order to the place, did I invite Irene, sans Gordon, and sans Gordon Junior, and sans her twins, who were even worse brats than Junior. She was in the early weeks of another pregnancy, and so she was pale and unwell. Naturally she pronounced the place absolutely dreadful. She and I split a bottle of champagne on the deck before going out to eat at the Farm Café, which she also pronounced dreadful. She’s very refined, my Irene.

Five years apart in age, we are a study in contrasts. I was always painfully self-conscious about my birthmark, socially awkward, and slow to make friends. Irene was like Grace Kelly before there was a Grace Kelly: beautiful, blonde, bland, impervious to trouble of any sort. Irene’s mother had run off with a stuntman, and her father, Walter, was one of those actors destined always to play roles where he smokes a pipe. When Florence married Walter in 1941 (her third husband, by the way), she insisted I leave my grandparents’ house and come live with them and Irene in Brentwood. I refused to go, and threw tantrums; I was ten years old and Summit Drive was the only home I had ever known. Leon and Julia said absolutely no, they would not part with me, until Florence threatened legal action. That would have meant a scandal. Florence would have done it too. She had a long-smoldering resentment against Leon and Julia.