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LOS ANGELES — Some 500 friends and relatives of Daniel Pearl remembered the slain journalist Sunday as intelligent and sometimes clumsy, but always generous and committed to changing the world. 

“That was really our agenda in our own way,” said Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who spoke at the memorial service inside the Skirball Cultural Center. Information about the invitation-only service came through a single pool reporter who was allowed to attend. 

Daniel Pearl’s parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, his sisters Tamara, 40, and Michelle, 32, and about a dozen friends and relatives shared their memories of the Wall Street Journal reporter. 

Others at the service included Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger, John K. Bauman, the consul general for Karachi, Pakistan, and boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who had pleaded for Pearl to be freed after his Jan. 23 kidnapping. 

Pearl, 38, South Asia bureau chief for the Journal, was kidnapped while researching links between Pakistani extremists and shoe-bombing suspect Richard C. Reid. A grisly videotape received Feb. 22 by U.S. diplomats in Karachi showed Pearl dead. His body has not been found. 

“He was courageous and brave, but not because he was a journalist out there in the trenches doing things that were risky,” said Daniel Gill, 38, of San Francisco, who met Pearl met when both were fourth-graders at a San Fernando Valley elementary school. 

“He was courageous and brave because Danny, more than anyone I knew, had the courage to live, and live well. I think he lived more in his 38 years than I have and probably ever will,” Gill said at a press conference after the service. 

There was more laughter than tears as people recounted anecdotes from Pearl’s youth in Los Angeles, his college years in Stanford University and his professional career with the Journal and other newspapers. They also recalled his musical talent on the fiddle and other instruments. 

Members of one of the bands Pearl played in, The Clamp in Washington, D.C., played a song they had composed together called “The World is Not a Bad Place.” 

Mariane, who married Pearl in Paris in August 1999 and lived and worked with him in India, said that the couple drew up their own wedding contract that contained commitments “to always remain open to new cultures and new people, and to inspire others with our relationship.” 

“We felt we were really lucky to have met each other,” Mariane said. “The more time we spent together, the more we loved each other.” 

Mariane, a French free-lance journalist, said she and her husband traveled everywhere together, and she doesn’t understand why she wasn’t with him the night he met his ultimate captors. 

“Even death cannot separate us. I make the commitment to enable him to live throughout me, throughout our son,” said Mariane Pearl, who expects to give birth to the couple’s only child in May. 

Pearl’s father, Judea, and his friends talked about his uncanny ability to land on his feet and talk his way out of predicaments — like the time he convinced a cab driver to loan him his belt for a job interview. 

They said that after he was kidnapped, they held on the hope that he would be able to talk his way out of that as well. 

“He knew for sure that no matter how complex the situation, some good fairy would take care of him, and she did for 38 years,” Judea Pearl said. 

Pearl was born Oct. 10, 1963 in Princeton, N.J., and grew up in the San Fernando Valley in northwest Los Angeles, graduating with honors in 1981 from Birmingham High in Van Nuys. He graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a degree in communications.