Besides all the famous names, there are dignitaries from a dozen philanthropic arts boards that Julia generously funded. Their women look like moneyed bonbons. Our sweet neighbors, Fred Astaire and his wife, they’re here, and dear Buster Keaton with his always-sad eyes. All of Empire Pictures is here, not just the production chiefs, the financial wizards, and Melvin Grant’s whole law firm, but all of wardrobe, makeup, set design, down to the lowliest gaffers and carpenters. Empire people loved Julia; she always threw a massive Christmas party on the winter solstice and then insisted that the studio close down between Christmas and New Year’s. Paid vacation for everyone! When she and I left California in ’49, Leon ended that practice. Leon casts a long shadow over all these Empire people, hundreds of them. I have vowed to myself that before this terrible week is over, I will step out of his shadow. I hope I have the strength. Julia always told me: “The more strength you use, the more you will have.” I’m counting on that to be true.

Leon takes my black-gloved hand and squeezes it as if I am three again, a child who needs to be reassured. My grandparents are the only real parents I ever knew. I call them Leon and Julia because that’s what they called each other. Grandma and Grandpa are the sorts of names you might give to a tugboat. Leon and Julia are yachts, sophisticated, strong-willed, charming (manipulative, many would say), elegant, powerful personalities. The same cannot be said for the woman on my left, Florence, my mother, sitting beside her inebriate third husband, Walter. In the row behind us I cringe to hear my brother-in-law, Gordon, inadequately suppress a burp. He sits with my sister, Irene, and Jonathan. Jonathan and I have been friends since we were tots, brother and sister without shared parents.

I was basically orphaned and went to live with my grandparents when my father, Rowland Granville, returned to his native England and the West End stage, and my mother, Florence, decamped with a South African animal wrangler she met on a movie location. I was about three. Honestly, Florence was no loss to me. Then—and now—with a sidelong glance she can reduce me to self-hating pulp. That’s why she’s sitting to my left. On the right side of my face I have a birthmark, like rouge too eagerly applied from my temple to my cheekbone. It’s easily subdued with makeup except when I am upset for any reason, and then it’s an unfortunate barometer of my emotions. An imperfection I can never quite forget, certainly not in a city that worships physical beauty, and really, what other kind of beauty is there?