I WAS EIGHT when my life with George began. He was 38. My mother, the Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors, was 32. She had just packed up my dog, my two brothers, our nanny and me and left her last husband, Don Siegel, Los Angeles, and Warner Brothers behind. George was Hungarian, had become a British subject during the war, was a novelist, and had recently been in America as a screenwriter. It was 1952 when we all arrived in New York and moved into a brownstone house together on East 95th Street.

George's play Flight into Egypt was soon to open, directed by Elia Kazan. My mother was scheduled to play the lead role in Anastasia on Broadway the following fall. It must have felt golden to them both. Two immigrants, three children, one house, one dog, numerous guinea pigs and parakeets, one turtle. Perfect. Except that the House Un-American Activities Committee was in the midst of its witch-hunt and Kazan went to Washington and gave names. George never spoke to Kazan again, not even when he, with his wife Frances, bought the house next door to us. They walked their dogs on opposite sides of the street for years.

When I first met George, he arrived at the front door with gifts of soap for me and my older brother John. I came down the stairs in my most beautiful dress. John came down aiming his cowboy pistol. Soap may have been a precious commodity in war-torn London, but it was a confusing gift to us.

We didn't love him immediately. He wasn't a “baseball playing” kind of a dad. He assigned us poems to learn by heart: “When I am old and gray and full of sleep” was my first (looking back, Yeats was not the most obvious choice for an eight-year-old). More upsetting, he didn't protect my poodle when Arthur Miller's spaniel attacked him.