While my mother slept on a fold-out couch in the living room, my sister and I shared the bedroom. Lucy and I had twin beds. In the darkness before we fell asleep, I instituted a program called "Assembly," modeled after school assemblies. I introduced talent, frequently a singer, and then sang a song ("16 Tons" maybe, or "Mr. Sandman"). Most likely I was trying to restore order to our shattered reality, and I remember feeling contentment as I went about this ritual. Lucy was ambivalent about it--sometimes protesting that she wanted to sleep, sometimes joining in with a song or an announcement herself.

In the fall of 1951, we had moved with our mother from a small mansion with an orange-tiled roof on North Rodeo Drive to this one-bedroom apartment at Olympic Boulevard and McCarty Drive. My father and mother were getting divorced for the second time, their second marriage having lasted six months. I was almost 8, Lucy not yet 6, and my mother just 27.

It happens that our stay in that apartment corresponds to the dawning of continuous memory in my life. Before it I see scattered glimpses: an apartment with gray walls near the Plaza Hotel in New York, where my parents broke up the first time . . . the bridle path down the center of North Rodeo Drive, where one quiet, sunny afternoon I taught myself how to ride my bike no-handed. But from the apartment building on, a narrative coalesces.

Martha Stevenson is a friend of my mother's. A pretty, young Southern woman, blond with delicate features, she had been married to the bandleader Hal Kemp, who died in an automobile accident after they had been together only a few years. Their daughter, Townsend, is a year or two older than I, excellent in school, and a know-it-all. One day at Martha's Beverly Hills house, Townsend asks if I can do a swan dive.

"Yes," I answer.

"Really?" She's impressed. "Can you do any other dives?"

"A jackknife."

"A jackknife? Really? Can you do a flip?"

"I can even do a double flip."

A week or two later I'm poolside with Townsend. She awaits my swan dive, jackknife and double flip. I go to the diving board, walk to the end of it and, after the briefest hesitation, dive.

"Why did you lie?" Townsend asks indignantly as I get out of the water.