SOUND AND FURY

As a member of the Warner family (my mother was a sister of the Warner brothers), I want to state that I felt “Sound and Fury” was both misleading and inaccurate. The article states that Benjamin Warner, my grandfather, “always lived within walking distance of the synagogue.” My grandfather lived, during the few brief years that I knew him, at 507 N. Arden Drive, Beverly Hills, which was hardly within walking distance of a synagogue. And do you really believe Jack Warner said, “I didn’t dig it at all” when his father hired a rabbi to teach Judaism to Jack?

More important, the tenor of the article concerning the religiousness of Harry and Albert, as contrasted with Jack, was in error. Harry, Jack and Albert were members of the Reform branch of Judaism, and Harry, for as long as I knew him, was a member of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, which was hardly a bastion of Conservative Judaism, let alone Orthodox Judaism.

SAMUEL WARNER HALPER

Los Angeles

Neal Gabler responds: “Benjamin Warner’s living in walking distance of a synagogue was told me in my interview with Jack Warner, Jr. The quote of Jack Warner’s is on Page 17 of his autobiography. As for Harry Warner’s religious convictions, what I refer to in the excerpt and throughout my book is not religious affiliation but the difference in the spirit of religiosity between the brothers.”