Standing together, at some distance from the rest of us, I notice many Negroes. I recognize a few cooks from the Empire commissary, and a few Empire janitors, and servants from Summit Drive, including Clarence, of course. Impossibly tall, thin, stoic, terse, his hair sprinkled with gray, Clarence runs my grandfather’s house the way a conductor runs the Philharmonic. Perhaps the solid woman beside him is his wife. Only I didn’t know Clarence had a wife. That strikes me as suddenly curious. I’ve known Clarence for twenty-two years, all my life, and I didn’t even know he was married? The others, earnest-looking, middle-aged men decorously holding their hats, I don’t recognize any of them. One older gent is in a wheelchair with a tall young man beside him who holds an umbrella over his head, as if protecting the older man is a solemn duty. He closes the umbrella as the rain ceases, but he does not lose his air of vigilance.

I shiver. Leon puts an arm around me and pulls me close to him, and then I’m really afraid I will cry. I love him so much, but I still feel sharp little stabs of resentment. Was Leon with that slut Denise Dell when Jerrold Davies called him with the news of Julia’s death? At least Denise and her pimp mother, Elsie, have the decency not to show their faces here today.

How could Leon have chosen Denise over Julia? For forty years, Julia was more than a wife; she was his partner in creating, maintaining, and advancing Empire Pictures. She read and evaluated scripts, helped to make casting choices, offered sotto voce comments on-set, and watched the endless boring dailies in our screening room while I slept in her lap. Who else but Julia Greene, with her enormous verve and charm, could have persuaded George Gershwin to write music for a frothy Max Leslie comedy in 1937? Sure, George agreed to write for Sam Goldwyn’s Follies, but Empire is a much smaller outfit; Empire could never pay what Sam Goldwyn could pay—but George was happy to do it for Julia.

I close my eyes and think back to those childhood days and nights at Summit Drive when George and Ira Gershwin were among the not merely famous, but legendary guests, all of whom basked in the Greenes’ hospitality. Actors, writers, directors, producers, composers, editors, cameramen, set decorators, and costumers, as well as the city’s great philanthropists, they all came to croquet parties, tennis matches, late-night suppers on the candlelit terraces, musical evenings, movies in the screening room, lavish Easter egg hunts for the children, annual New Year’s Eve galas, intimate dinners, leisurely lunches by the pool—oh, and the Christmases! Everything Julia did, she touched with glamour. If I think of that now, I will cry. I mustn’t cry.