A WhatsApp from Maggie Renzi, the producer of John Sayles’s Lone Star and most of his other films: “Cari has died.”

No need for a surname, there’s only one Cari in our lives. Maggie and John sat me next to Cari Beauchamp in a pizza restaurant in Cannes around 2001. For three hours that night I listened to this expansive Californian.

I’d read her book Without Lying Down, about women in early Hollywood, so was all ears. As she talked of Gloria Steinem and “Mary” – Mary Pickford, co-founder of United Artists with Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and DW Griffith – I filled her glass and wondered if she reminded me more of Eve Arden or Thelma Ritter.

When someone dies, you can’t control the memory sequence. My first thought was Cari’s feet. She drove barefoot, and had the biggest bunions I’ve ever seen. I thought of her bed in her LA house, which was like a boat with a hint of Gloria Swanson. I think I remember her saying that she used to have the diaries of Anita Loos (who wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) under it.

I skim read her emails – 481 of them – which was a mistake as they now taunt with her absence. Over the years I’d heard about her time doing PR for Democratic governor of California Jerry Brown, and about her stint as a private detective. She talked about her book on Joseph Kennedy Sr, father of JFK, lover of Gloria Swanson – and all round dick – with such energy. As I gradually realised I was inseparable from her, she’d send the manuscript of a new book – My First Time in Hollywood, for example – or an article. She wanted to write a new book on Swanson, and we had spaghetti and a lot of red wine (after which she drove us on the LA freeways) talking about how to get a Gloria Swanson book published.

But then I thought of the people Cari introduced me to. Charles Tabesh, the great programmer of TCM. Judy Balaban who dated Montgomery Clift and whose father Barney was president of Paramount Pictures from 1936-64. A surprise lunch with Nancy Olson, who was in Sunset Boulevard. Bill Kramer and Randy Haberkamp of the American Motion Picture Arts and Scientists. By this stage our friendship had also turned to work. Cari was in my The Story of Film: An Odyssey, and associate producer of my Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema.

But maybe it’s not the visuals, or the emails or the people who best evoke Cari Beauchamp. Maybe it’s her language. If you’ve read her books you’ll know how good they are, but the talk of “Mary” and “Doug” – Pickford and Fairbanks – showed how close her imagination was to prelapsarian, pre-Code Hollywood. As she often said, west-coast American cinema was invented by “the women, the Jews and the gays”. When she spoke, Cari interspersed her sentences with “Ehm”, a conversational hyphen. And there were so many phrases – “Doris Day parking”, for instance, which means that you arrive at a restaurant and miraculously there’s a space waiting for you. In one email she says that she’s editing a book which is “Mommie Dearest meets The Joy of Sex”.

What was her imagination like, this film historian, author, film-maker? Her sons Jake and Teo and her closest friends can answer better than I can. She was formed by Berkeley, by protest, feminism, and by the fact that there is something treasurable in the American film studio system. In an email she wrote: “Look after you. Please get cynical.” She meant don’t do things for nothing. Another one of her lines: “I don’t leave home unless it’s tax deductible.”

And in an other email: “I feel like I take care of so many people.” Another Beauchamp phrase which she said so often: “Know that you are loved.”