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the wonderful and gory tales about the Christian martyrs. One in particular fascinated me. Saint Tarcisius, known as the boy saint, was a twelve year-old-acolyte who lived during the Roman persecutions of the third century and met a grisly death rather than give up the Eucharist to an angry mob. I was fascinated by this story of youthful courage and devotion. So impressed was I that I told Sister I wished I could live my life all over again because I would be so much better .
—How old were you then?
    Six .

Three
    My most vivid early memory of my mother is the care she took in looking after every detail in her grooming. It made her special .
    Something else that was special was the tattoo on her left thigh. It looked like an eye sitting on a triangle. I never ceased badgering her about what the tattoo meant, but she never told. Still I grew up knowing that most likely I had the only mother with a tattoo. She had a flair for glamor and created many faces for herself, each favoring the look of a current movie queen .
    She would have a new boyfriend to go with each new look and always brought them home to meet me, introducing them as Uncle John or Uncle Joe or Uncle Whoever. I knew they weren’t my real uncles, but I was too young to call them by their first names, and the situation was too informal for me to address them as “Mister”. The one I liked best was Don Sebastian, a handsome Spaniard .
    In Los Angeles I attended Beverly Vista Grammar School, which was ten blocks from our apartment, but Mom trusted me to take care of myself on the way to and from school. There was a boy, younger and smaller than I, who lived nearby. He was a nasty little fellow. One day he showed me a necklace he was wearing. It was moving. He had a necklace of live ladybugs around his neck! He had pierced each one, and the poor things were struggling to escape. I was horrified—and furious .
    A few days later I lay in wait for this murderer at his house. I grabbed him and twisted his arms behind him and pushed him down into his basement. Now he would get a taste of his own medicine. I tied him tight to a pole with a clothesline and left him there, yelling his lungs out .
    When I told my mother what I had done, she lectured me that I should have been more cautious. “Holy Toledo, sweetie, you should have considered that there could have been an accident while he was tied up, like the furnace exploding. No, you shouldn’t have done what you did. You should have just beaten the crap out of him .”
    This is the child who once carried a ladybug ten miles on the streetcar to show her little friend Amy Godshaw and then brought it back to Beverly Hills so it wouldn’t get lost.

    Bert had remarried after the divorce but remained in nonviolent contact with Harriett, who was friendly toward Bert’s new wife, offering sympathy and frequently first aid whenever Jan would appear with a black eye.
    Bert lingered under contract with Twentieth Century-Fox for a couple more years without catching on. It was back to walk-ons for the rest of his film career with two exceptions. He played the heavy opposite Robert Montgomery in Once More, My Darling , and he had one scene, albeit silent, as Anne Baxter’s cad of a lover in the episodic O. Henry’s Full House . He did a little stage work at the Pasadena Playhouse and with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera before calling it a day. Coincidentally, his old army buddy, Freddy Cocozza, was beginning what would be a spectacular movie career just as Bert’s was fizzling out. Cocozza was now Bert’s brother-in-law, having married Betty Hicks, and he had a new name. He was now Mario Lanza.

    Dolores was spending most of each year in Chicago so the question of schooling was a chief consideration. The nearest public school was some distance from Hermitage Avenue, through busy streets and across streetcar tracks. Esther simply wouldn’t allow Dolores to walk there. There was a Catholic school closer to home with