Hi Steve

   I’ve just found your site — didn’t know about it before, but it’s very interesting. I don’t think my father Frederic Goldsmith ever had as much attention as a writer in real life.

   I incorrectly spelled my grandfather’s name when writing to Al Hubin. He was known as Igee [Goldsmith], but his first name was Isidor (not Isadore). It’s possible I picked up this mistake from IMDB, which has the same mistake.

   Otherwise, I thought you might like to hear this cute story. Although I never knew Igee, I did know Vera Caspary [his second wife] and would visit her whenever I was in New York. We wrote quite a few letters.

   When she died I was sorry not to have anything of hers, so I contacted her executors asking for something, a nice copy of one her books for example (since I knew she had many shelves full of first editions etc.) But I was sent a dull meaningless book club edition of Laura which didn’t even have a dust jacket, as if I’d been just a fan.

   Two months ago, I was clearing out the house of my mother, Barbara, (Frederic Goldsmith’s first wife) after she died, and was browsing through her books. There was very little of interest there, but I did, by chance, pull out a faded hardback, with no cover, to look at it more carefully. It turned out to be one of Vera’s books — Thelma — and inside it had been inscribed “For Barbara and Freddie and Paul – in love – Vera – October 1952,” i.e. just a few months after I was born.

   It made my heart sing.

PS:  There’s quite a lot of information about Vera in her autobiography The Secrets of Grown-ups.