I thought she would be able to give me the guest lists for his parties, but instead she served up something much more delicious.
She told me she had rewritten the story to include the possibility of a previously hidden part of Brand's life. Two of her friends had spilled the beans about it one night over drinks.
Brand, who in official histories had one wife, three dogs and no children, may at the same time have had another wife and two sons. One of Judy Brand's friends knew the supposed other woman as "Aunt Birdie."
"Let me tell you, I was flabbergasted," said Judy Brand, who is now 65 and living in Denver.
Brand was even more surprised when her friends recalled Birdie Esther Carpenter Gordon as a gray-haired, frumpy widow who lived modestly. She'd seemed so, well, average -- how could she have had an affair, and with such a prominent man?
When she first heard the story in the 1990s, Judy Brand was still married to Leslie Carlton Brand, who refused to believe it.
But she was intrigued. She had solid leads -- names, faces, real people. But could the story be true? Could she prove it?
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A double life?
By the time Judy and I started talking, she'd already interviewed nearly a dozen family members and friends. She had found out the names of Birdie's sons, Lee and Jack Gordon, and tracked down Lee in Australia. Lee wrote to Judy that he had been told by his mother that L.C. Brand was his father. "My mother was Birdie Esther Carpenter, born in what is now Sun Valley, Idaho. She was 'a beautiful lady' who won a Miss Nevada contest. Possibly this is where she met Leslie Brand," he wrote.
"Possibly" didn't meet Judy's standards. Lee put her in contact with his son Ken, the family historian.
Ken said he'd been told that Brand met Birdie on a train from Oregon to Los Angeles, gave her a job and sent her to secretarial school. When they met, Birdie was in her 20s, Brand in his 50s.
Judy asked if the Gordons resented not carrying the Brand name, but Lee reassured her.
Brand "did not leave a damsel in distress, as Mission Land Co. sold my mother property at Rinaldi Street and Laurel Canyon Boulevard for $10," he wrote to her. Brand ran the San Fernando Mission Land Co.
Lee said that his mother lived on that land as Mrs. Lee Gordon, a name Brand "picked out of the phone book," and that Brand provided for the family.
