I glance sideways. Leon’s profile is dignified, even regal, but I have come to see him not as a child regards a beloved grandparent, but as a grown woman judges a man who has disappointed her. My respect for Leon has ebbed, and like the beach at low tide, you see all sorts of trash and debris and garbage, mud you never knew existed while you floated on bright water.

Despite his dalliances, Leon and Julia stayed married. She always believed Empire Pictures was Leon’s true mistress, but her stunning collection of jewelry testifies to his many infidelities—and his remorse. However, his affair with Denise Dell did not end like his other affairs. Denise absorbed his time and energy, and finally, his loyalty, and his love. As the affair went on—and on and on—Julia and Leon engaged in long bouts of screaming, oaths, and threats. Their anger then decayed into cold silence. Julia moved into her own suite at the opposite wing of the house. Leon was seldom home anyway. By my last year in high school the mansion on Summit Drive had fallen silent, a thirty-five-room cocoon of unhappiness from which no butterfly emerged. Julia cloaked her bitterness with the dismissive phrase “No fool like an old fool.” But that old fool broke her heart. All she could salvage was her pride. She took that (and me) and moved to Paris in 1949. I could write a book about Paris, about the people I met at Julia’s weekly soirees, Thursday evenings in our 8th arrondissement apartment near the Parc Monceau, about going to little smoky boîtes and hearing Sidney Bechet play, about L’Oiseau d’Or, for that matter. (I was the only student who rode a bicycle to the school—very much frowned upon by les grandes dames!) I would have stayed in Paris happily, but Julia insisted that an American girl needed an American education, so I went to Mills College in Northern California, where earlier this month Jerrold Davies made a transatlantic call to tell me that my grandmother had died of a heart attack.

But Jerrold is not here for the funeral. Jerrold can’t even return to the US. He fled a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950 and went to Paris, where his Best Picture Oscar for The Ice Age sits on the rickety shelf of a Left Bank apartment. He uses the Oscar as a hat rack. Simon Strassman fled to Mexico in ’51. I think his passport was revoked. Nelson Hilyard is dead, a suicide. Of the old guard Empire writers who delighted my childhood, only Max Leslie is here, standing between his grieving wife, Marian, and his longtime secretary, Thelma Bigelow.

“Come on, Honeybee. Let’s go home.” Leon holds my hand, raises me to my feet. “We’re done here.”