Carla was just a toddler when Arnold moved the family from Chicago to Bel-Air, after his friend, dam and pioneering California highway builder Lynn Atkinson, defaulted on a personal loan from Kirkeby he’d taken to finish the dream home Atkinson had built for his wife. Now, the Kirkebys would live in the elaborate estate. Carla says her mother wasn’t thrilled about inhabiting the swanky home now known as “the Beverly Hillibillies house.” Carlotta felt the house was too big and extravagant. (Even though the home had been built for her, Atkinson’s wife had expressed a similar sentiment.) Nevertheless, the Kirkebys settled in and hired a nine-person staff, six of whom lived in the house. Carla says she wanted to learn to cook, but their chef—a 6-foot-tall Dane named Ida who served the family for over 40 years—barred her from the kitchen.

Carla’s childhood reads like a transient fairytale. Though they were based in LA, her family also flitted between homes in Florida, New York, and Cuba, where Arnold owned the Hotel Nacional, which hosted the infamous mafia “Havana Conference” in 1946. At the age of five, her name was already appearing in the society pages of newspapers. Carla attended Westlake School for Girls (which later merged with the Harvard School for Boys to form Harvard-Westlake) with Hollywood notables like Candice “Candy” Bergen. As a junior, Carla transferred to University High School Charter, a.k.a. “Uni,” in West LA. Beverly Hillbillies fans were constantly swarming the Kirkeby home: “We’d look out the window and see people picnicking on our lawn,” she says. Strangers came knocking, looking for the Clampetts. She fondly remembers Max Baer Jr., the actor who played Jethro in the series, occasionally napping on their sofa.

Discovering a historic jewel heist might easily be the most interesting thing to happen to most people. But the captivating details of Carla’s life threaten to reduce it to a footnote. At 14, she threw a wild rager that ended after a partygoer made off with one of her parents’ prized Christmas presents: a silver platter engraved “to Arnold and Carlotta, from Ron and Nancy.” (The Reagans were the Kirkebys’ next-door neighbors and friends.) At 23, police stopped her for going over 100 miles per hour down the Pacific Coast Highway in a Ferrari 275 GTB4—the same make and model as a missing car that belonged to Sharon Tate, who had recently been murdered by Charles Manson’s followers. She says she once wrested her mother from the notorious clutches of John Paul Getty after what she described as “a mediocre dinner” at the magnate’s Surrey estate. On another England adventure, she strolled into a chauffeured Rolls-Royce in London to find herself face-to-face with a young Mick Jagger. Angelina Jolie’s mother was her children’s babysitter.

Still, the robbery stands out, even to this day. On that fateful night in early December 1961, Carla’s parents were, as usual, at a party. They were still gone when Carla came home around 10:30 p.m. “I went upstairs to my mother’s room to get a magazine,” she says, “and saw all of her jewelry boxes on the floor, in a perfect row.” Though they weren’t in disarray, Carla still knew something was wrong: Her fastidious mother would never have left out the boxes, which were normally kept behind a hidden wall panel so secret that no one outside of her immediate family even knew it was there. She opened each box and found it empty, confirming her suspicion.