The family spent summers in Provincetown, Mass., where Mr. Kearney also had a studio and foundry, hanging out with Norman Mailer and others. When his fourth wife Beverly’s Citroen, a gift from Ernest Hemingway, stopped running, Ms. Kearney recalled, her father flattened it with a bulldozer and turned it into a giant weather vane with the face of Charles de Gaulle.

Her father remade another expired automobile into an earwig, and held a funeral for it, with a festive bonfire and readings from the Bible by Mary Heaton Vorse, the author and activist, and Edward Bonetti, the poet.

“This is what the grown-ups were doing when I was a child,” Ms. Kearney said.

In what would have been her junior year at Harvard, Ms. Kearney left Cambridge and got a job as a ticket taker at a movie theater back home. She fell in love with the janitor, who was also a poet, and he followed her back to college, where he supported his writing habit by selling chains that proclaimed, “Oy Vey,” which he advertised in The New Yorker.

After she graduated, he persuaded her to move with him to Hollywood. “I wasn’t that interested in Hollywood,” she said, “but I wasn’t very good at saying no at the time.”

She knew no one there, except for Walter Beakel, a former drinking buddy of her father’s. He was a talent scout and agent who in his younger days had been a member of the Compass Players, the comedy improv group in Chicago that would become Second City.

Mr. Beakel got her an interview with Fred Roos, who was Francis Ford Coppola’s producer. Mr. Coppola was looking for someone to read scripts as a regular moviegoer might. It was a terrific first job in the film industry: In her two and a half years there, Ms. Kearney was a driver for Jean-Luc Godard and a witness to George Burns’s will (for which she received a cigar in thanks), and she met Tom Waits, David Lynch and Wim Wenders, all of whom had offices at Zoetrope, Mr. Coppola’s production company.